Retail stores, banks, cash centers, casinos, sports arenas, as well as other types of establishments handle a significant amount of cash on a daily basis. Although payment cards, such as credit cards, debit cards, and stored value cards, are now widely used by customers, it is still an inevitable part of retail, banking, armored car, cash centers and other businesses to receive cash payments and handle/process cash or cash-like items. Be it a large department store, a small convenience store, a bank, a vending operator, a casino, a sports arena, a restaurant (including quick-serve or fast-food restaurant), or any other type of retail-like business, each establishment that accepts cash payments or processes cash for retailers or consumers faces considerable costs involved in the management of cash and cash-like items.
While it directly impacts the books of a cash-accepting or cash-processing business, cash management is surprisingly inefficient. Significant costs and losses can be attributed to inefficient cash management processes in place today.
Cash management includes the handling of all types of cash or cash-like items (hereinafter “cash items”), including coins, banknotes, tokens, vouchers, and gift cards etc. In terms of coin management, most retailers either manage coins manually or resort to discrete or ad hoc mechanisms for counting coins, where loose coins and rolled coins are always counted, dispensed, or otherwise handled separately. There is also no efficient solution for handling rolled and loose coins concurrently with banknotes.
Cash handling at the beginning and the end of retail shifts (or days) has been quite inefficient. Retail employees typically spend a significant amount of time manually preparing till drawers, which process includes receiving a certain mix of coins and notes, manually counting those cash items to confirm the correct amount, and filling the till drawer. At the end of the shift, a similarly mundane, time-consuming, and error-prone process is repeated such that the cash items could be counted and eventually put away in a vault or safe, or used to prepare the till for the next shift. If sorting/counting devices are used at all, separate ones are often employed to handle loose coins, rolled coins, and banknotes, respectively. Similar inefficiencies exist for other parties such as banks and armored car companies who also routinely handle cash items.
Moreover, retailers' interactions with service providers, such as armored car companies, banks, and other third parties still rely on uncontrolled decisions and/or actions of in-store personnel and lack a disciplined approach. Even if specific rules or guidelines may be put in place to govern the personnel's handling of cash items, there has been no meaningful control mechanism to ensure strict compliance with the rules and guidelines. As a result, an armored car crew could arrive at a store only to find out that deposits (typically banknotes with denominations of $10 and above) are not ready yet for pick up. Or, conversely, an excessive amount of cash could be accumulating at the store or excess float may be held, all due to lack of automation and control.
Furthermore, not all stores can benefit from provisional credit from their depository banks. To benefit from provisional credit, a retail store has to invest in and deploy sophisticated (and expensive) equipment such as intelligent safes that count and validate cash deposits as they are secured in the safe on the retailer's premises. The intelligent safes will time- and date-stamp all the deposit transactions, and the information about the safe's contents, and the transactional history is communicated to authorized remote parties (e.g., the banks offering provisional credit). Only with the ability to know the secured cash value of a safe's contents, could a depository bank be willing to credit the retailer's bank account even before the corresponding cash deposit is physically received. The provisional credit is given, for example, as soon as the cash is deposited into the intelligent safe, overnight, or when a CIT service provider confirms to the bank the pickup of the cash. The retailer typically has to utilize armored car companies for the provisional credit service. With all these costs associated with the current process, many retail stores simply cannot afford or are unwilling to take advantage of provisional credit.
Overall, there has not been a well-defined or automated approach to manage coins and/or banknotes in general in a retail environment and the like. Nor is there any suitable hardware to enable more efficient and more effective handling of rolled and loose coins, such as the beginning-of-shift and the end-of-shift processes. Similar cash management problems and deficiencies exist at a bank branch or in retail “off-site” processing of cash items in general.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there are significant problems and shortcomings associated with current cash management in retail environments and the like.